Before you dive into any suggestions you might get here, keep an eye on what the folks at Serif.com (https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/) will come up with, after they have launched their third application (Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer, and Affinity Publisher now in public Beta) for both Mac and Windows platforms. They have not announced or promised anything yet, but they do have their priorities straight. They first concentrate on getting things right, before embarking on the next challenge. A cataloging application has been mentioned as being on their radar.

The issue is that one usually has to immerse oneself in the specific solution that certain companies offer to use them optimally. That makes it difficult to switch to something different if you don't like it after a while, or when requirements change. Some solutions are for very large catalogs/collections, but a bit overkill for more modest requirements.

What editing tools do you currently use? How many photos are we talking about (disk space or file count). Most folks end up with Lightroom, but there are other products that work better if you're using tools like CaptureOne or such. Things like Mylio exist as well, but I haven't looked into 3FR support in a few years. PC or Mac?

So this is where the 'what are you using it for' comes into play. A good DAM isn't going to be a good editing platform. There are things like https://www.resourcespace.com/ but for a single person I don't see any way it's possible to make the overhead worth it.

If you license your images to others, keeping track of that is huge, and a platform that helps would be important and worth the investment. Are you dealing with a few terabytes of data or more? Are you editing in Phocus or Photoshop?

It will be interesting to see if Serif chose to offer a DAM product, but it would be at least two years away which isn't much help for the OP now.

As John says, Lightroom does a pretty good job of image management for most individuals. Also it writes a lot of it's management data into standard locations (captions, rating etc) so can be picked up by other software if you need to change at a later date.

A logical file structure and naming system is the basic ground work of organisation. Again LR can make organising things on disk pretty straight forward too. If you do choose LR, make sure you read up how to import and manipulate file structures from within LR, the one thing that can throw up difficulties is moving files around outside of your chosen DAM solution once you've started cataloging.

One of the keys to Lightroom's success is that it combines DAM with adjustment. So when you manage raw files, you see how they look with your adjustments.

We take that for granted, but with pure DAM apps you're always saying "which one did I process as B&W?", "I wish I could see what's in that underexposed shot", and the workarounds are so-very 2006. Also, single user DAM products are thin on the ground - there's no money in them. So unless the OP needs multi-user functionality, it's hard to see why Lightroom wouldn't be the choice.

Might be worth while keeping an eye on Photo Mechanic 6 which is due out before the end of the year and will add DAM features to the current version.Photo Mechanic is an extremely good program for general file management and if they get the DAM right (which they seem to have been working on for about 12 years !!) it should be a good option.

One of the keys to Lightroom's success is that it combines DAM with adjustment. So when you manage raw files, you see how they look with your adjustments.

We take that for granted, but with pure DAM apps you're always saying "which one did I process as B&W?", "I wish I could see what's in that underexposed shot", and the workarounds are so-very 2006. Also, single user DAM products are thin on the ground - there's no money in them. So unless the OP needs multi-user functionality, it's hard to see why Lightroom wouldn't be the choice.

I wish I knew more about using my LR. One thing that makes sense. It's that learning everything about one program is better than learning and using two programs with less knowledge about each.